Rudy Giuliani Spent Hours On TV Trying To Kill A News Story That Might Not Exist

Rudy Giuliani was all over TV on Monday in what has been described as a ‘bizarre media blitz’. Some of Giuliani’s comments were difficult to understand even for seasoned journalists, but Giuliani has now suggested he was attempting to do damage control on a New York Times story that may not exist.

Giuliani started Monday by claiming collusion was not a crime on Fox & Friends. He then went on CNN and made a confusing statement about a meeting at Trump Tower involving Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer. Giuliani said that before the now infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians, there was another meeting involving Cohen, though three of the people who attended that meeting claimed it didn’t take place.

“You get to the other meeting he says he was at, that the president wasn’t at…with Donald Jr., Jared, Manafort… Gates and one other person. Cohen also now says that—he says too much—that two days before he was participating in a meeting with roughly the same group of people—but not the president, definitely not the president—in which they were talking about the strategy of the meeting with the Russians,” Giuliani said.

“The people in that meeting deny it, the people who we’ve been able to interview,” he said. “The people we’ve not been able to interview have never said that about that meeting.”

Giuliani’s comments were confusing for many observers of the Trump team and followers of the collusion story but Giuliani later claimed he was responding to a news story that has not yet been published. The story is apparently about the ‘pre-meeting meeting’ Giuliani discussed on CNN. But only Giuliani seemed aware of the story’s existence.

Giuliani told The Daily Beast that he believed Michael Cohen had tried to plant the story about the ‘pre-meeting’ in the press but his media blitz had managed to ‘shut it down’.

If there is a forthcoming Times story about the meeting Giuliani was discussing, a meeting he also claimed did not take place, no evidence has appeared of it.